


flesh calmly going cold

by forestdivinity (ForestDivinity)



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Drug Addiction, Gore, Hospitals, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Klaus Hargreeves Needs A Hug, Klaus Hargreeves Usual Warnings, Klaus Hargreeves-centric, Multi, Obsessive Behavior, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide Attempt, no beta we die like ben
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-16
Updated: 2020-08-21
Packaged: 2021-03-05 20:20:37
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,218
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25941250
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ForestDivinity/pseuds/forestdivinity
Summary: For Klaus, the world has always been a shade of blue, an icy wash over everything he saw.People weren't the only things to have ghosts. Before there were buildings, there were trees, there were birds in flight and walls where there shouldn't have been. Don't blink twice or the door will vanish. Do it three times, and you'll be staring into a mirror, seeing your own reflection bite back at you.
Relationships: Ben Hargreeves & Klaus Hargreeves, Diego Hargreeves & Klaus Hargreeves, Klaus Hargreeves/Original Character(s)
Comments: 22
Kudos: 149





	1. Chapter 1

The world is a light that fades in and out, flickering like the wires have split open. Veins, spilling out of soft, sweetbread flesh, not quite connecting any longer. On and off it flashes, blue like the sky, like the ocean, like blood before oxygen manages to touch it. An ambulance light that pulses as it races through the city.

Tonight, he may have taken too many pills.

* * *

For Klaus, the world has always been a shade of blue, an icy wash over everything he saw.

People weren't the only things to have ghosts. Before there were buildings, there were trees, there were birds in flight and walls where there shouldn't have been. Don't blink twice or the door will vanish. Do it three times, and you'll be staring into a mirror, seeing your own reflection bite back at you.

Reality isn't stable.

Wherever he steps there lies the bones of the dead and the forgotten - people often disregard the facts - the whole world is a gravesite. One that's continuously getting filled, filled, filled-

The grandfather down the road and his fat tabby cat who kills ten birds a day, their little bloody corpses left twitching in the street. Tweeting pathetically as Klaus avoids both the cracks in the pavement and their broken bodies. One step, two step, three step,  _ four _ . 

He blinks, and they're gone, and the path has shifted to something older. Lined with trees long since mowed down for industrial estates and cheap, government housing that barely lasts a decade. Klaus can't tell the living from the dead, the past from the now; they're one and the same. He can still taste the smoke of car exhausts and metal on his tongue, but around him, there is shouting of a hunt—the roar of an animal not willing to give up. 

One, two, three,  _ four _ , and he's running, not sure if he's predator or prey. 

* * *

As a child, his family had thought him funny. 

Hilarious, in fact, to watch your brother stumble in circles and talk himself silly trying to understand languages of those long past. Their first, second, third,  _ fourth _ nannies, all their stern faces twisted into a scream, their father's enemies. 

Their father's friends. 

It was funny when Klaus walked into walls that weren't supposed to be there or stopped at doors that no longer existed. Right up until it was a distraction, a misbehaviour that had to be corrected or else they'd all be punished. Then it hadn't been funny. Klaus had been a pain, an annoyance to his father, a frustration to his siblings. Something shifting and wrong.

People never liked to think about death.

They'd been four ( _ four,  _ **_four_ ** ) and Klaus had seen ghosts around every corner and known what sort of man their father was. Known the ache in every corner of their death riddled house and known the world shook with it too. Reginald, with his monocle and pinched not-quite-a-frown, had been the only constant, something strange and unreal in his solidity. When Reginald Hargreeves had stared at him, Klaus had stared back, all void and death and reality folding in on itself until it collapsed behind the iris of his eyes.

It was four (his name, his number, his defining trait) years later when he'd been locked in the mausoleum for the first time. Before, the dead had simply been an addition to the world and its endless confusion. He'd been young enough then that he hadn't been scared of how false the world was. 

Always a lie and himself the liar. And then-

Then the mausoleum and it's wild unruly dead. Then the frenzy and the cold and the dark and the lonely ache, never knowing what was real. Was it the earth beneath his face or the sick-sweet stench of rot that soaked into his pores. If he stared long enough at his fingers, there was his own body dying in rapid motion.

* * *

Reality isn't stable. It isn't his fault, Klaus tells himself, that he's the only one who can see it. He thinks of runaway Five (comes after  _ four _ ) and wonders if he might understand. 

Space, and time, and death - they're all related—endless, unstable loop. 

Five isn't around anymore. 

Four isn't either. Klaus had shed his number like a snake sheds skin—all at once over rot-stone floors and yet the skin grows back. His past like a shroud. Death cloaks him, and he's sure everyone can see it. A blue cloud, a haze that keeps flickering him from young to old. Living to dead. It's hard to tell if he's really the wrong one when everyone seems the same to him.

* * *

Three by  _ four  _ is twelve, and he's wearing Grace's heels because Allison won't share. They're glossy red when they're not unworked leather, when they're not the soft brush of cow's fur. Klaus is a child with no ambitions beyond  _ take another step.  _ There is no end in sight, only the endless recycle of new into old. 

The stairs are there, and then they are not. 

Klaus is falling before he can realise that the landing had been remodelled in the seventies. His mother's shoes are ruby red in the air, and they are cows skin on the floor. 

There is still red on them. He blinks and blinks, but it doesn't go away. Spills across the stone floor, across the tile, across the wood, spills bright and shiny, stark against the blue tint of the world. There is pain, somewhere down and to the right of him. It's on the curve of his jaw and in the beat of his heart in his chest, and for once Klaus feels alive and sick with it.

There is something about being broken—

He lies there for one minute, two, three,  _ four _ , and bleeds until the world goes from blue to white and grey and red. His heart pounds to the same rhythm, always to four and then back again. Klaus doesn't have an obsession with the number, it just likes to follow him around and wave its slimy fingers at him from the blue yonder. He doesn't seek it out,  _ four _ just hides behind every corner.

* * *

When he wakes up, it's three thirty-three and Klaus curls his lips in spite. There is a blanket he can feel that has nothing to do with the duvet that's been tucked in around him and everything to do with the drip in his arm. The world still flickers blue, but now Klaus can see the forest for the trees; or rather, he can see the living bones of the house clear through the haze. 

What a wonderful thing. What a shock to combat the ache of the end of a life. The end of unliving. 

Klaus breathes through his nose and out through the whistle of his wired shut jaw and decides at that moment (at three thirty- _ four _ ) the rest of his life must be spent in the same clarity of pain and drugs. How sweetly the two go together.

He's agnostic then—has been for years, has seen religions live and die in the flashbacks of an ancient world—but he thanks god, God, and all the gods around him for the out he has been given. An entrance to the world of the living, though he'll never be on equal footing, not with one foot in the grave and the other in the hollow at the Earth's core. 

The drip in his arm has a dial that spans from one to two to four, to eight. He'd been eight in the mausoleum, all ripped fingernails and bitten lips, throat hoarse from screaming to just be let out. The dead are kind until they are not and Klaus has been on the receiving end of their ire for the last four (four,  _ four, _ always four) years and now there is silence. Not quite blissful, but shimmering none the less.

It's not unusual. 

Klaus reaches over, and the dial slides easily between his finger and his thumb, a smooth glide across the numbers. Up and up it climbs one tick after another until the dial rests on eight. The last wonder of the world, Klaus has never liked the number eight. Two and four have never been friends. Too similar.

Too different.

The world shimmers and then solidifies into something stark and sharp and grey. It reminds Klaus of his father. Not living because he'd never known death. Merely existing, with no history to fall back on. Even the blue is fading, in greyed out wisps. 

Without the ghosts of the dead, the room is dark. Darkness is something Klaus is not well acquainted with, despite what many would assume. Oh, he knows the theory of it—the absence of light, the colour of black—but Klaus has always been surrounded by blue light. The endless flicker of it. His own heart feels heavy in his chest, the dark a blanket, the drugs weights spread throughout. 

He holds the dial down until even that feels like holding up the world. He is Atlas in that moment, carrying the skies on his shoulders and all he wants to do is set them down. So he does.

In his ears, there is a beeping. The tinny sound of it ringing across the room. His body is not his own anymore, and somehow Klaus finds he likes it better that way. The strange disconnect between his brain and the shifting of his toes. Around him, the world is stirring in motion. Unfairly awake when all he wants to do is sleep, hands on his forehead and his mother's unfailing voice.

His father's figure, cutting sharp and strict in the doorway, grey as it always is. 

Klaus blinks, and the lethargy takes him.

* * *

He's sixteen (four by four sixteen, four sides like a square, Klaus is in his prime at sixteen) and Klaus Hargreeves is an addict. He sneaks pills from the infirmary and alcohol from the bar that dear daddy dearest always keeps fully stocked. Rum and wine and brandy are his three best friends, at least until he moves onto morphine and finds a better time.

It is easier, and it is harder. 

Sure, they drown out the wail of the dead, but Klaus is still high when he takes them. And being high comes with its own set of rules. Brings its own haze across the world that leaves him giggling and bright-eyed and more annoying than ever. But at least he isn't walking into walls, following the trail of a house long knocked down.

Klaus laughs at his own thoughts; the depressing melancholy of them. They sound the way Vanya's music feels. Klaus can see the echo of her childhood in the dull of her eyes but only when he's sober. The brown turned blue turned white of a dozen dead nannies, and maybe he could tell her if it wasn't for the bitter taste of  _ "i heard a rumour"  _ rattling through his jaw.

Maybe he would tell her if he wasn't so eager to escape his own nightmares down the bottom of a bottle. Let her share as they swap pills and ruminate over their father and their fears of tight places. 

But he doesn't, because his hands still shake and Vanya looks at him the same way as the others—like he's worth less for his problems and less still for his solutions. 

Hah! 

What do they know anyway? Nothing about the world and the way death goes on endlessly. They are only burdened with the living, and their ghosts only haunt them when they sleep. Klaus has seen their dead and their dying, and he's tired of it. Tired of being the odd man out. 

Junkies, he's been told, are a dime a dozen; there's only one Seancé. Klaus just wants to fit it. Maybe he can't be normal, but he can at least be normally fucked up, in a world that's grey and white, dark but stable. Hence the drugs.

And the alcohol.

And surprisingly the sex. 

Because he's sixteen and has been sneaking out since he was thirteen on the hunt for something better than scotch. Back when mom could lock the cupboards better than Klaus could pick them but never thought to do the same to his bedroom window. There are a lot of people out there who are willing to hurt a child. Klaus has listened to them since he was eight (two by four, eight is a bad,  _ bad _ , number) so he knows how to curve his lips into a smile and say what they want to hear.

So he's Four and addicted to anything that makes him feel alive, but he's never going to get there, not with death in his veins leaving his blood icy thin. It's like putting cold cocoa in the microwave, whenever he takes a hit; it works but only to burn at the last minute—what a joke.

It's not his fault no-one understands what it's like to take a minute and get thrown a mile out of time. Maybe number Five but he's gone even to Klaus.

He knows he's repetitive. He's stuck in a cycle, how can he not be? 

* * *

When they're seventeen, Ben dies. Klaus is just glad that it's not a multiple of four. It would have made more sense if it was, but nothing makes sense anymore. Number Six is gone, and all Klaus wants to do is fall apart.

He wants to see his brother again. He doesn't want Ben to be dead. 

What a colossal fuck up their lives are. Death, dead, and dying. Klaus is so goddamn tired all he can do is stare at the statue dear old Reggie puts up and wish that he was the one in the ground. Something tells him that he's unlikely to get that eternal rest.

Klaus goes out after the funeral, memorial, whatever you want to call it. Spends a night snorting cocaine off the abs of a man twice his age and pretends he doesn't see Ben, arms crossed in the corner. Blacks himself out drunk because it's better than seeing in shades of blue and decides he's not going home. 

Not now. Not ever. 

Ben doesn't leave, even when Klaus forgets his own name and loses feeling in his toes. Just hovers in the corner, tired, disappointed, and oh-so dead. They don't talk for six months and when they do it's four (why? why  _ four _ ) words that break his heart—

" _ I still love you _ ."

* * *

And then he's twenty and in and out of rehab as one sister gets famous and the other stays mousy, plain, and painfully ordinary. He would help, but Klaus is too far gone to be a good person. Not when he's being shouted at every minute that he's sober, not when Ben is hovering over his shoulder begging him to be better.

Doesn't Ben know that Klaus had given up the minute he saw his brother dead? Every minute that he's haunted is just another reminder to sink himself into a bath of vodka and hope the next time he blacks out, it'll be the last.

It isn't. It never is. Klaus doesn't know how to die—maybe he's already dead. You can't kill something that's never been alive in the first place. He's less alive than a building, less alive than the Earth itself.

Isn't that funny, Ben? Isn't it just!

Ben never laughs at his jokes. Ben doesn't think he's funny, but then the dead have never had a good sense of humour. Maybe it's just Ben. Number Six had never been prone to laughing, even when he was alive. Klaus thinks he would understand if he was two (four) percent more depressed. There's a reason he no longer goes for downers.

The world is shit enough as it is.

* * *

He gets to twenty-four, and then there is Diego. Number Two. Two, half of four but twice as good as Klaus has ever been. He's at a party. Or he was at a party and then he was arrested, and there are scratch marks up his arms that he doesn't remember getting. They are red and ghostly blue, stark in the light of a jail cell. 

It has been a good few months since Klaus has been this sober. Ben lingers at the edges of the room and shakes his head sadly. It would be easy to tell him to fuck off, but Klaus has been called schizophrenic once this year already. No need to tempt fate. Not when the room is spinning round and round. 

Jail cell, the backroom of a church, graveyard of a thousand souls. Klaus rarely knows where he is.

But Diego is there, scarred and scowling. Everyone around Klaus is always scowling, if not wailing and screaming. Christ on a bike, what does he have to do to see a smile around here, he asks himself, and waves airy and light at his brother. 

"Get up-" He tells Klaus (two words, not good enough, not enough at all) and Klaus counts in his head. Clicks along with his fingers while Diego's face gets darker in annoyance. "I didn't pay your bail for you to stay lazing around in a jail cell, get up Klaus."

Eighteen words. Divides by two, not by four, Klaus gets up and saunters on unsteady legs. He can't tell where the bars begin and the corridor ends, Diego shifts from young to old. 

How long has he even had a scar? It's alternately healed and bleeding big blue drops, Klaus fights the urge to wipe it with his thumb. Diego wouldn't like that, but then Diego has never liked Klaus. 

Somehow they still ended up close. 

They are linked after all.

When Klaus trips, it is Diego who catches him, broad fingers curling around the whip-thin cord of Klaus' arm. Even now, with anger in his eyes, he's here for Klaus, bruising in his intensity. Klaus doesn't want him here. All he wants is to go back to being solitary Number Four. 

Diego doesn't let go of him until Klaus is in the backseat of a beat-up car that smells like rainforests and gasoline and Klaus can imagine little dinosaurs walking back and forth across the hood. Tiny t-rex all in a row. He's never seen something prehistoric, though he knows they must exist, dead as they were.

As usual, he has no idea how his goddamn powers work. 

Instead, he lies back and thinks of Jesus. Thinks of Judy from the halfway house with half her face missing and dearest little Jackson who made him pancakes at the break of dawn. Diego is talking to him, but Klaus can't hear him over the rush of blood in his ears. 

"-Are you even listening to me?" Diego is yelling now, but all Klaus can see is blood on leather seats, all slick and bright blue because as he keeps being told  _ it's not really there _ and he thinks he might hate those four words more than any others.

"Yeah, yeah-" Klaus tells him and then says it again for good measure. Repeats himself like words are going out of business and Ben has no right sighing at him when Klaus is the only one he can speak to. 

Ghosts, what a pain.

Klaus wants to tell them all to fuck off back to the underworld from whence they came, but if life was that easy he wouldn't be an addict with track marks in his elbows and a habit of near-death experiences. There's only so much trauma one man can go through in a lifetime and Klaus has experienced centuries worth of it.

Most boys don't get followed around by a ghost with his eye missing, screaming about hell and murder, teaching them about enucleation at the tender age of seven. Klaus had wanted to vomit then too.

He wants to vomit now, see all his twisty inside bits come out. He knows he's disgusting, but he can't help it any more than Diego can help hitting a target. Some people have more delightful gifts than others. Two got the ability to cause death, Klaus merely got the ability to lie in it. Spend years or hours in the earth and find his body rotted and his mind still whirring on and on. 

When he laughs, he can't stop it. Something tells him he's crying too, the wetness on his cheeks maybe or the way Ben is looking at him all sad and mournful. Why does he get to mourn? 

He's only dead after all.

  
  
  
  
  



	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> shorter chapter than before but it's here!

Diego chucks him out on Christmas Eve. The twenty-fourth. Two, four. It matches them. Klaus doesn't blame him, he'd kick himself out too, but he's still mad enough at Deigo that he goes to the closest overpass he can find and drinks himself silly.

Senseless, Ben would call it, but Klaus isn't listening to him right now. 

Diego had tried to help in his own brusque way. All rough fingers, bruises, harsh words that make Klaus want to curl in and protect the soft flesh of his stomach like a wounded animal. He's trying his best, anyone could see that. It's not his fault that Klaus can't stand his stupid face or the dumb boxing gym he lives behind. Under. Inside. Diego's room flickers like the rest of the world and Klaus had always had trouble finding his way back. It had been a squatter's haven in the eighties, and old mafia booze runners from the twenties had still milled around, calling Klaus a lush. They weren't wrong.

Bastards. Even with their fingers cut off they'd managed to flip him the bird. 

It wasn't his fault that the world was flickering blue and white and all Klaus had wanted to do was get his hands on bottles of long-gone contraband wine in order to feel stable for an hour. He'd been far enough along on withdrawals that he couldn't tell the difference. Couldn't tell what was real and what was really there. Between Diego yelling and the constant stutter of gunfire, he'd just been desperate for peace.

Maybe stealing the giftbox wrapped neatly for Diego's definitely-not-a-girlfriend had been taking it a bit too far. Diego had taken weeks of overtime cleaning the gym's stained floors to buy it. Sunk months of what could have been rent to get Elanora - Dora? Eugina? - the gift and then bragged about it to Klaus afterwards. A good brother wouldn't have stolen it.

Klaus wasn't. 

The gold chain, crystal necklace had fetched him enough for a weekends worth of heroin, and two bottles of vodka to top it all off. Klaus should have felt bad, but he didn't.

So Diego had kicked him out.

Which of course brings him to Christmas Eve—well, Christmas morning now—and an overpass he's not sure how to get down from and snow. There's a lot of it this year. The last time it had come down so thick had been when he was seventeen, and he tries not to think of that year, not with Ben shifting in and out of his gaze.

The snow is white and blue and ever so cold. It bites his fingertips and his toes. Klaus only has strappy sandals to wear, and the vodka only does so much to keep him warm. Below him, there is water. Ice. Klaus stares as it spins in and out of his vision.

_ Lordy-lordy, I'm over forty _ , Klaus laughs to himself. Forty feet high maybe, probably more for all Klaus knows. All he can say for sure is he's very high up. Like a bird.

He wonders if he could fly. Take off into the blue and white and the whole abyss of it all and lose himself in it. Birds don't often get lost, Ben reminds him. Real Ben, ghost Ben, or the Ben who only exists in his head? Klaus isn't so sure.

They're all the same, aren't they? 

Bird's don't get lost. Pigeons have a homing device to guide them home. Klaus doesn't know what a home is, he's never had a nest to return to. Only a grave that he can rest in if he ever gets to die. He teeters on the edge of the overpass and stares at the frozen-over river - it must be a river, right? - spreads his wings, and flys.

* * *

Klaus wakes up in the hospital, and they tell him its a miracle he's alive. It's not a miracle, he wants them to know, its a four-day bender he's been stuck on since birth and God decided she hated him halfway through and won't let him off the ride. When he tells them that, they up his happy pills and add lithium to his regimen.

It's the only reason he hasn't busted out yet because this isn't rehab and Klaus has four types of painkillers that they give him every eight hours and a dozen other mood stabilisers because they think he's mad.

Maybe he is.

Scratch that. According to Ben, he definitely is.

"You tried to kill yourself, Klaus-!" Ben yells at him when they're alone at night.

"No, Benny, I didn't!" Klaus insists, all four-word, six-syllables and broken glass underfoot. How many people had wound up in this room and done their very best to die? Klaus can see a few of the lucky (unlucky?) ones, can see rope made out of bedsheets and full pill cups and he wants to vomit but he can't.

They'll keep him up all night for observation if he does.

"I was trying to fly, Benji-button." He hisses when he hears movement outside the door and rolls over to face the wall.

"Fly into the river? You don't have the power to float, Klaus!" Four, eight, his head is fucking pounding despite the painkillers they have him on, and he wants Ben to just fucking shut up right now.

Maybe he doesn't have the power to float. Doesn't seem to have the ability to die either, but it's only been twice.

Twice. Two. Just a coincidence, not enough to be called a pattern. Not enough at all. Klaus shakes the thoughts that are rattling around his skull and wills the room to fade to grey if only so he can get some sleep. Exhaustion has set heavy in his bones. Klaus can't remember a time he wasn't tired. 

One might even call him dead on his feet!

Klaus can't help the giggles that leave him at his own stupid, neurotic joke. The lights in the hospital are always too bright. There's always the faint beep of machines that Klaus can't place by ear, the dull tone of a flat line. He hates it here.

He hates it everywhere.

(Except maybe on his father's stone floors, with his mother's heels beside him. Except maybe on the ice below the overpass, all white stained red. Everywhere but there).

Later, they come in to sedate him, and Klaus is still laughing even as a nurse holds him steady so they can slip a needle in his vein. At least now he can get some sleep.

* * *

They let him out in April. Four months in a hospital room and Klaus has managed to play nice, to smile. Do all the things that people expect from a normal, well-adjusted man, all the things Klaus is not and has never been. Will never be.

Sure, his gift lets him see the past, not the future, but some things are just inevitably true.

Klaus Hargreeves is a fuck up.

He walks eight blocks from the hospital and swallows twelve pills at once, doesn't even bother checking which bottle they're from. Enough of anything will get him high, especially after such a strictly controlled regimen throughout his stay. It was possible, Klaus thought, that staying on the doctor's schedule might have helped him. It was equally possible and infinitesimally more likely that Klaus would end up the same way he always did - scared, lost, and alone. So he takes the handful of pills, and Ben looks on from the sidelines and Klaus isn't sure if he's wallowing in disappointment or despair. Both maybe, or neither. Perhaps Ben has just realised that Klaus is as prone to self-sabotage as Ben was prone to eldritch monsters bursting from his torso at any given moment.

That is to say, it happens often enough to be a regular occurrence. At least, Klaus's fuckups happen regularly enough, Ben hasn't had the tentacles from the unknown appear since he died. Powers don't seem to work in the afterlife. 

Funny thing that, Klaus can't wait to try it out.

One day. Not today, though, not this year. This year he'll be twenty-five, and that's not an age anyone wants to die at, Klaus doesn't even feel like flying. Instead, he finds his way to the nearest bar and drinks to his dearly departed but not yet dead brother.

Five had the right idea, getting out early. Klaus just wishes that the damn brat had taken him along with him. Not that he had much reason to, Klaus ponders over a glass that is more vodka than it is coke. 

What a dick he would suck for some coke right now, and a line of speed out of a hooker's abs.

The point is, Klaus is an odd one, for all his sharp even lines. It's no wonder that Five left him behind (left everyone behind, but Klaus doesn't dwell on that because he's never been the same as his family, never existed right in space and Five should have, must have understood and yet-) and went off to pursue his own life.

Whatever that might be.

Physics, probably. Five had always liked physics. 

"To Einstein and Five-" He groans as he tilts his glass to Ben. 

"You should go to the halfway house, Klaus," Ben tells him, arms crossed across his chest. 

Dumbass. That has nothing to do with Five. 

Klaus thinks of the halfway house. White walls and blue curtains and a steady supply of boring, hot food that always leaves him sick to his stomach. Thinks of the ghosts of people and the disturbing fake smiles of the nurses. Hospital socks and the way he can never see the frostbite of his toes or feel tile beneath his feet.

"Nah." He tells Ben. Succinct, single word response, all fearless leader like Number One. Luther, who couldn't even tell their father that he still wet the bed, so he got up early every morning to wash his sheets.

Klaus hadn't the heart to tell him that Reggie already knew.

There was a bit of Luther in all of them. First, last, everything in between. Luther had thought he was unique for being the first, but Klaus knew the truth, it just made him the most common of the lot of them. And yet they'd all wanted a piece of what he had regardless. That easy obedience, the camaraderie he'd had with their father. Klaus tries to test out that authoritative tone on his tongue but by Ben's sigh, he can tell he's failed.

Whatever.

He never wanted to be Number One anyway. 

Four suited him just fine.

**Author's Note:**

> I just wanted to do a Klaus study! If you like this be sure to kudos and if you love it leave me a comment!!
> 
> Talk to me on tumblr [@ashayathyla2](http://ashayathyla2.tumblr.com/)
> 
> or join [The Umbrella Academy discord](https://discord.gg/ekvnK3u) for WIP updates and fun discussions!


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